Agent Stakeknife 'cost more lives than he saved'
Report released on British Army's Troubles-era agent inside the IRA's Internal Security Unit
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has today released a report on ‘Stakeknife’, a British Army agent who operated inside the IRA’s internal security unit during the Troubles. The report can be downloaded here.
In accordance with the British Government’s ‘neither confirm nor deny’ policy, the report of Operation Kenova does not name Stakeknife, but he is widely believed to have been Freddie Scappaticci, who died last year.
The report concludes that Scappaticci’s crimes as an agent cost more lives than they saved. In an accompanying press release, the report’s author Jon Boutcher, states:
Most fundamentally, even if it were possible to accurately and reliably to say that a particular agent within a terrorist group did more good than harm, the morality and legality of agents doing any harm - with the knowledge of or on behalf of the state – would not be accepted today.
I believe files submitted to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland by Operation Kenova contain strong evidence implicating him and others in very serious wrongdoing. In my view, much of this could and would have been avoided if Northern Ireland agent running had been subject to proper regulation, control and oversight during the Troubles.
It was announced last month that the files submitted by Operation Kenova, against seven alleged IRA members and five former soldiers, will not result in prosecutions.
Since completing the report, Boutcher has been appointed Chief Constable of the PSNI, which some have seen as a conflict of interests. Today’s interim report will be followed by a final report and individual family reports carried out under Operation Kenova’s new head, Sir Iain Livingstone, former Chief Constable of Police Scotland.
Decisions about implementation of the interim report will be taken by PSNI Deputy Chief Constable Chris Todd, Boutcher having recused himself. Boutcher’s recommendations call for an independent statutory framework for the investigation of legacy cases. This is directly at odds with the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, which enforces the end of such investigations, and is being challenged by the Irish government in the European Court of Human Rights as a result.
The report includes sections on the intelligence roles of the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Special Branch, and MI5. I will update the web version of this article with some thoughts once I have digested its contents.
Update 1: This Twitter thread by Edward Burke captures some of the tensions within the report.
Update 2: One key discrepancy concerns the degree of influence which MI5 had over the Army outfit which ran Stakeknife, the Force Research Unit.
A former Commanding Officer in the FRU has stated that everything it did was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent. Senior MI5 officers and the various DGs I interviewed deny this categorically.1
Boutcher interviewed five former director generals; Stella Rimington, Stephen Lander, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Jonathan Evans, and Andrew Parker. Several of these had served in Northern Ireland and Boutcher’s judgements elsewhere imply he gave their version more weight than that of the FRU handlers.
Yet he acknowledges this picture is at odds with the service’s initial approach to his investigation.
Kenova’s relationship with MI5 has endured some extremely fractious spells and the process of extracting information from it has sometimes felt like a hard-fought uphill battle. Given that MI5 had very little involvement in running security force agents in Northern Ireland during the course of the Troubles and Stakeknife himself was run by the FRU, this may appear surprising and it has certainly troubled me.2
Boutcher’s account of the history of agent-running in Northern Ireland certainly understates MI5’s role at the outset of the Troubles. He correctly notes that MI5 was slow to focus on counter-terrorism in the 1970s, but follows many recent accounts in ignoring the role of two MI5 officers, Christopher Herbert and David Eastwood, as Directors of Intelligence at HQNI between 1969 and 1972, the very period when Army agent-running began.
From 1973 MI5 officers held the post of Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), based at the Northern Ireland Office. The DCI was represented at by Army headquarters by an Assistant Secretary Political (ASP).
The ASP role was to ensure that MI5 views were represented at military headquarters and that it was kept informed of developments relating to the Army’s collection and exploitation of intelligence. The ASP was also responsible for providing operational security advice to Army intelligence on agent running activities including, where appropriate, agent resettlement. However, several of the previous DGs of MI5 Kenova interviewed stressed to me that the Service did not perform any leadership, controlling or authorisation role in relation to the work of the Army agent running unit, the Force Research Unit (FRU).3
This claim would be stronger if it was backed up by documentary evidence like terms of reference of the kind which certainly existed for the earlier Director of Intelligence position. As things stand, there must be a suspicion that the professional intelligence officers in MI5 were content to allow the relative amateurs in the Army to do the dirty work.
Such a relationship would replicate that between the intelligence community as a whole and the political leadership.
The lack of any legal or policy framework to guide FRU and RUC agent handlers in particular and of any associated oversight or supervisory mechanisms were very serious failings: they put lives at risk, left those on the frontline exposed and fostered a maverick culture where agent handling was sometimes seen as a high-stakes ‘dark art’ practised ‘off the books’. This culture was well captured by the journalist Mark Urban in the title of his Troubles related book ‘Big Boys’ Rules’ and, while it may sound glamorous, and I would not deny the courage and bravery of many of those involved, it was inherently unsafe. To the extent that there were any‘rules’, they were formulated informally by those on the ground, apparently without regard for the requirements of the ECHR, the rule of law or Home Office Circular 97/1969.4
I would argue that the studied refusal to provide the agent-handling guidelines requested by operational agencies over a long period of time was itself a form of high level collusion, a term Boutcher avoids.
One area where Boutcher does identify an MI5 role is in the 1980 report on agent-handling produced by future Director-General Patrick Walker.
The Walker report appears to have led to an unhelpful separation between the intelligence gathering and law enforcement sides of policing in Northern Ireland. The report, and how Special Branch interpreted and applied it, resulted in the routine practice of intelligence not being shared with those investigating Troubles related crimes, on the basis that to share such information would risk exposing where it came from. The way senior officers in RUC Special Branch interpreted the report led to a monopoly in agent related activity across the force. It also resulted in a cabal of Special Branch self-interest that was fiercely resistant to any form of scrutiny or oversight based on claims about a paramount need for secrecy.5
Boutcher reserves his most serious criticisms, not for state agencies, but for the IRA Internal Security Unit, within which Stakeknife operated as a mole.
Some in the republican movement consider that these activities were legitimate acts of warfare. They were not. Having examined in detail what the ISU did to its victims, no one should be in any doubt that these crimes amount to some of the worst atrocities of the conflict. The republican leadership gave carte blanche to the ISU to commit acts of torture and murder, there was no internal accountability whatsoever.6
It should be noted that Boutcher’s moderate appraisal of Stakeknife’s operational significance does nothing to bolster the claims of some anti-agreement republicans that the agent helped to shape the peace process. Yet, within that group, the report’s comments on the level of agent infiltration risk boosting the very perceptions on which the IRA’s traditionally ruthless approach to informers was founded.
Some Republicans have long regarded the Stakeknife story as a deliberate ploy to focus attention on the IRA, and away from the FRU’s collusion with loyalists. Some such motive probably did play a role in the agent’s exposure, but that does not change the underlying facts. The Sinn Féin First Minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill has wisely today heeded Jon Boutcher’s call to give an apology to the families of alleged informers who were killed by the IRA.
OPERATION KENOVA NORTHERN IRELAND ‘STAKEKNIFE’ LEGACY INVESTIGATION, Interim Report of Jon Boutcher QPM, 2024, p.172.
Boutcher, p.118.
Boutcher, p.59.
Boutcher, p.68.
Boutcher, p.30.
Boutcher, p.65.